Choosing a VM Restore Configuration- Understanding Disaster Recovery
When restoring a VM, you will see two restore options, as shown in Figure 17.39:
■ Create New: You can use this option if you want to create a new VM. You can create a VM with simple settings, or restore a disk and create a customized VM.
■ Replace Existing: You can use this option if you want to replace disks on an existing VM.
FIGURE 17.39 Restore Configuration options
As one of the restore options, you can create a VM using settings from a restore point. To do so, perform the following:
- In Restore Virtual Machine, click Create New.
- In the Restore Type section, select Create New Virtual Machine, as shown in Figure 17.40.
FIGURE 17.40 Restore Virtual Machine
3. Continue to fill out the following sections of the Restore Virtual Machine page: Virtual Machine Name— Specify a VM that doesn’t exist in the subscription.
Resource Group— Select an existing resource group for the new VM, or create a new one with a globally unique name. If you assign a name that already exists, Azure assigns the group the same name as the VM.
Virtual Network— Select the VNet in which the VM will be placed. All VNets associated with the subscription in the same location as the vault, which is active and not attached with any affinity group, are displayed.
Subnet— The first subnet is selected by default.
Staging Location— Specify the storage account for the VM.
4. Click Restore to start the restore operation.
Implement Disaster Recovery by using Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery adds to your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy by providing:
■ A Site Recovery service that keeps business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery will replicate workloads that are running on physical and VMs from a primary site to a secondary location. If an outage occurs at the primary site, then you will fail over to a secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is back up, you can fail back to it.
■ A backup service, Azure Backup, that will keep your data safe and recoverable.
Site Recovery can be used to manage replication for
■ Azure VMs replicating between Azure regions
■ Replication from Azure Public Multi-A ccess Edge Compute (MEC) to the region
■ Replication between two Azure Public MECs
■ On- premises VMs, Azure Stack VMs, and physical servers
Table 17.2 shows Site Recovery features along with a brief description. This information came directly from Microsoft’s website.
TABLE 17.2 Site Recovery features
| Azure automation integration | A rich Azure Automation library provides production- ready, application- specific scripts that can be downloaded and integrated with Site Recovery. |
| Azure VM replication | You can set up disaster recovery of Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region or from Azure Public MEC to the Azure region or from one Azure Public MEC to another Azure Public MEC connected to the same Azure region. |
| BCDR integration | Site Recovery integrates with other BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server Always On, to manage the failover of availability groups. |
| Customized recovery plans | Using recovery plans, you can customize and sequence the failover and recovery of multitier applications running on multiple VMs. You group machines together in a recovery plan, and optionally add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure Automation runbooks. |
TABLE 17.2 Site Recovery features (Continued)
| Feature | Description |
| Data resilience | Site Recovery orchestrates replication without intercepting application data. When you replicate to Azure, data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. |
| Flexible failovers | You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero- data loss or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss, depending on replication frequency, for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it’s available again. |
| Keep apps consistent over failover | You can replicate using recovery points with application- consistent snapshots. These snapshots capture disk data, all data in memory, and all transactions in process. |
| Network integration | Site Recovery integrates with Azure for application network management. For example, to reserve IP addresses, configure load balancers and use Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers. |
| On- premises VM replication | You can replicate on-p remises VMs and physical servers to Azure, or to a secondary on- premises datacenter. Replication to Azure eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter. |
| RTO and RPO targets | Keep recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) within organizational limits. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper- V. You can reduce RTO further by integrating with Azure Traffic Manager. |
| Simple BCDR solution | Using Site Recovery, you can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from a single location in the Azure portal. |
| Testing without disruption | You can easily run disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication. |
| VMware VM replication | You can replicate VMware VMs to Azure using the improved Azure Site Recovery replication appliance, which offers better security and resilience than the configuration server. |
| Workload replication | Replicate any workload running on supported Azure VMs, on- premises Hyper-V and VMware VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers. |
